Gnomecrafting

With some delay I’m going to present the last pieces from our exhibition “Making Mining Networking” at The Edge, Duke University, NC. Please use the junaio App to scan the image.

This piece thinks about the so-called “immaterial labor” of computation and gameplay, taking the popular game Minecraft as a thematic locus for reflecting on the way that contemporary platforms mine ludic activity, process it algorithmically, and transform leisure-time consumption into a new form of production or work. Mirroring this process, we have taken metadata generated while our son played online sessions of Minecraft and turned it into a new data gnome. In the augmented video that appears when you scan the painting, you’ll also see the first gnome we planted back into the Minecraft world.